THE NEW YORK TIMES: Acequias, a network of water channels created by the Moors over 1,000 years ago, are being excavated and brought back to life to adapt to the crises of climate change.
High in Spain’s southern mountains, 40 or so people armed with pitchforks and spades cleared stones and piles of grass from an earthwork channel built centuries ago and still keeping the slopes green.
“It’s a matter of life,” said Antonio Jesús Rodríguez García, a farmer from the nearby village of Pitres, population 400. “Without this water, the farmers can’t grow anything, the village can’t survive.”
The extreme heat sweeping across much of southern Europe this week is just the latest reminder of the challenges that climate change has foisted on Spain, where temperatures reached 109 degrees Fahrenheit on Tuesday, putting half of the territory on orange and red weather alert. Such heat and extended droughts have presented the threat that three-quarters of the country could be engulfed by creeping deserts over this century.
Faced with that reality, Spanish farmers, volunteers and researchers have reached deep into history for solutions, turning to a sprawling network of irrigation canals built by the Moors, the Muslim population that conquered and settled in the Iberian Peninsula in the Middle Ages. » | Constant Méheut* | Wednesday, July 19, 2023
* Constant Méheut spent two days reporting from the villages of Pitres and Cañar, in the Alpujarra mountains, in southern Spain.
